I reckon the 9200 is not an unreasonable investment. Unless you intend to eventually replace the Smurf with a late G5 or a Mac Pro, you can still put it to good use as a second card in anything up to an early 05 G5.

I reckon the 9200 is not an unreasonable investment. Unless you intend to eventually replace the Smurf with a late G5 or a Mac Pro, you can still put it to good use as a second card in anything up to an early 05 G5.

I bought a 9200 for the exact reason you mention. And I'm not one to spend more money than needed (cheap) but I planned on using the PCI 9200 in as many future machines as possible. The 9200 is currently in the GF's B&W and my G4 has a 32MB original Radeon Mac Edition running my second monitor. I never owned the 7000 version of the card but all the reviews I read gave the original Radeon 32MB card a better rating than the later 7000 series 32MB Radeon.

I could swap the 32MB card with the 9200 and she probably wouldn't even notice but I have the OEM 32MB AGP card in my Quicksilver and adding a 128MB PCI card for the second monitor seemed kinda backwards. I do plan on upgrading the AGP card to a 9800 Pro someday (when they get cheaper), then I'll put the PCI 9200 in the G4 then but it serves a better purpose in the B&W right now.

I honestly don't see much difference in my 32MB card and the 128MB card, but I have to admit I haven't really used the B&W with the 9200 card a lot so my comparison is pretty limited. I had the Mac Edition 32MB card in my last B&W (OS 10.3) and it worked well. No complaints at all.

I ended up getting the Radeon 9200. I can't complain about it at all. In OS 9 UT runs real smooth. It get better frame rates than my AMD 64 laptop, which has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600 64 mb video card. It doesn't run as fast as my wife's ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 128mb, which is intergated onto the board of her eMachines. Of course, I am comparing it to two windows machines, but in the same game the FPS are about in the middle of the two. I don't know how else to compare the performance of the Radeon 9200 PCI. Maybe I can get some actual FPS numbers, with the same settings, up later today after work.

In OSX 10.3.9 all the menus and everything runs smoothly. I have some trouble playing certain videos , but I suspect that is a CPU problem since I have a 1 GHZ G3 in there instead of a G4. I think VLC likes the G4 better. Heck, as long as Youtube works I am happy. I couldn't for the life of me get my Pismo to play any Youtube videos. I don't have a DVD drive on my B&W so I don't know how DVD playback is, but I assume it is good, since it can play most movie files just fine.

I am so happy with this B&W! My windows laptop's USB Ports were starting to go and This has been the perfect replacement for most things.

One thing you can do to improve playback of video is use mplayer and activate a feature in preferences called "slow frame rates on slower machines". Although it does lower the framerate it makes playback a lot smoother. Back in 2003 the only mac I had was a B&W 350mhz and it was able to play high quality avi in a very tolerable way. So with mplayer and that feature enabled on a G3 1ghz you'll be golden.

I have what maybe a silly question. I have 2 Dual Hard Drive Trays in my B&W, and my question is, why is the top of the dual tray not lined up with the bottom? If I put a normal 3.5 HDD in the top slot, then I would only be able to screw in two of the screws on one side of the HDD. Is there a reason that it is offset like this? Both of my dual Hard Drive trays are like this, and I was just curious about it.

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